Audi-Turgy

John Baker

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Literary Manager John Baker discusses the upcoming World Premiere ofYou For Me For Youby Mia Chung, and his role as dramaturg on the production.

tW: What initially drew you to Mia’s play You For Me For You?

JB: We first became aware of this play because it was being developed at the Icicle Creek Theater Festival [a year ago], and were extremely excited about it immediately. I’ve never seen somebody tackle this really tough subject matter from this very unexpected and whimsical point of view. The fact that the play has magic realism in it and is also about North Korea is so unexpected. And in that respect it is so Woolly. From the moment we first read it we were really into it.

tW: Woolly’s $4 Million Free the Beast Campaign supports the production of 25 new plays over 10 years, and You For Me For You is the inaugural project. What did that campaign allow you to do for this production?

JB: This is a super ambitious play, and to think about getting the script to the finish line in addition to all of these other pieces, like music and choreography, is a lot to take on in a traditional four-week rehearsal process. Free the Beast allowed us to have a three-day workshop here at Woolly that was specifically aimed at looking at the script with most of the folks who are now involved in the production. Then a little over a month later we all spent the entire month up in New York for the Ma-Yi [Theater Company] workshop. That workshop was two weeks in the room and two weeks in front of an audience. It was a very quick process, a quick and dirty barebones workshop that allowed us to take pre-production work to the next level and be like, “let’s get this up on its feet and figure out some of these impossible stage directions that we adore so much.” We spent a lot of time looking at the choreography, figuring out a lot of the movement sequences. We learned a lot about what was possible to do with not much.

It’s quite painful when you have only two weeks of rehearsal before showing it to an audience. In the moment it was definitely hard and scary for Mia to have it in front of an audience so early on. But it was important for her to be able to see what worked and what did not work, what we could improve on. It was quite painful, but it’s quite useful and essential too.

Free the Beast allows us to commit to a play before it is done. It allows us to say, we are excited by this writer, we believe in this writer, and we know that they can get this project to the finish line with the help of the other folks who are involved in the process: the designers, the director, etc. It’s about that trust between us as an institution and the artist and the artists in the room. This is a play that excited us the moment we saw it, and we knew when we started attaching all of these artists to it that it was going to be pretty kickass.

tW: It can be challenging to describe the role of a dramaturg. Will you describe what your role was for this production specifically?

JB: Most of my work has been script-centric. The script has changed a lot since we first committed to it. Mia is not afraid of rewriting, which is wonderful to see. If she feels like something isn’t working, she’s not afraid of going in and gutting a scene, gutting an entire character and figuring it out. A lot of dramaturgs describe themselves as sounding boards, and this particular process has been that. It’s not as though I’m necessarily providing solutions to stuff, it’s really just asking questions and then she is going off and thinking about them and deciding whether or not she wants to rewrite based on what we’ve been talking about. The script has changed a ton because of not only the conversations that I’ve had with her, but that I’ve also had with her and Yury. The three of us work as a team.

tW: One of the things that is so remarkable about this play is that the lyricism and magical realism sneaks up on you. One such stage directions is, The Crossing is the fight of your life in which Time and Space are ground into pebbles so tiny they can slip through the cracks of an enormous fist. How is magical realism (the incorporation of fantastic or mythical elements into an otherwise realistic work) employed in the piece?

JB: Throughout the process we’ve had a lot of conversations about, how would this work in the real world? If they cross the river, as in that stage direction, where are they crossing to? How do they get from China to the US? And as the piece has developed, sometimes we get caught up in the logic of the world because we do feel the responsibility of portraying real subject matter. But that’s what’s so lovely about the play, and one of the things we were first drawn to, was how it walks that line: covering this quite serious subject matter in this whimsical way. And the magic in the play is obviously where some of the whimsy comes from. We discovered early on that we can use magic to tell a lot of this story without getting caught up in too many details. We trust that the audience is going to be there and go with us on this journey of two sisters. This play is not operating in realism or naturalism. That’s not what it is.

At its core, this is a story of two sisters trying to flee North Korea. And you say that and you expect one thing, but it’s completely different. And that’s what’s so Woolly about it — the play subverts those expectations. A Woolly play is something that exists on the edges of theatrical style and human experience. Often times when I’m reading scripts I encounter plays that fit into one of those two categories. They are either really theatrically ambitious or they are really tackling subject matter that is on the edges of human experience, it’s on the periphery of what we normally see on the American stage. I feel like Mia’s play hits both of them. It’s truly expressing the idea of Defy Convention, and this process is proof that you don’t need to be afraid of committing to a new play, you don’t need to be afraid about committing to an unknown.